CERN Scientists Looking for the Force

An anonymous reader writes "National Geographic has a fascinating article on the God Particle, which can help explain the Standard Model and get us closer to explain the Grand Unified Theory. The obligatory Star Wars-angle summary is even better: 'CERN's scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter.'"

Comments

God particle?

[Keys1337]

Why would they call it the God particle, they must know they will never find it.

Re:mitichlorians

[fred fleenblat]

Especially the female researchers. I'd love to spray my Higgs particles all over their lovely Bosons.

MOD PARENT IGNORANT

[l2718]

To those who would then say "Aha! So clearly photons do interact with gravity!", it's important to note that photons may be affected by the curvature of spactime, but they don't have mass and thus don't interact gravitationally. For instance, photons cannot attract each other gravitationally (whereas matter does), and a photon won't attract matter gravitationally.

To those don't understand physics: please stay off physics-related discussions

In fact, everything interacts gravitationally, and has a mass (more properly, contributes to the Stress-Energy tensor). Indeed, photons don't have a rest mass; however, by the famous formula $E = mc^2$, they do have mass-energy -- and this mass does interact gravitationally. It is true that, in general, the stress-energy of a single photon is small enough that it will have negligible back-reaction to the curvature of spacetime, but this is not the same as saying that the photon will have no back-reaction at all.